My flights to San Francisco were the most problematic I’d had. Up to then everything had been pretty much right on time, with no delays of any kind. On the way from Portland, the pilot announced early on that there was fog in Long Beach, but that he expected it to clear up by the time of our arrival. If it didn’t, he added, he had taken enough fuel to circle the airport for a while. I was sitting just behind the wings; as we came into land, I felt a sudden surge of power from the engines and saw the flaps retract. The aircraft started to climb, and sure enough, the pilot had decided not to land because the clouds were below the 500-foot minimum needed. So we turned circles in the sky for an hour or two until it cleared enough for us to land. As we approached the terminal, I didn’t see a single other airliner around. I told the pilot that he must have done something right if we were the only plane around.
As you might gather from the fact that ours was the only plane there, there were going to be a lot of delayed connections. On the positive side, I had a long time between my flights, meaning that my plane might very well get in so that I’d be on time. Unfortunately, the lounge was crammed with people waiting for flights and security informed us that we’d have to leave the secure area. Just what I want—to go through security twice in one day. I killed time on my computer and by watching football. They were only letting a flight or two at a time through the security line, and I never heard them announce my flight. It was still supposedly on time, but I could tell it was going to be too quick a turnaround for them to pull it off, since the plane didn’t land until just a few minutes before my departure. By the time I decided to go through security, there was a huge line, my flight was leaving soon, and they were pulling people from my flight to go to the front of the line. Regardless of what your parents and teachers told you, sometimes procrastination does pay off.
I landed in San Francisco just a few minutes late and met with Regina, who was nice enough to let me crash at her apartment in San Francisco. Even though I’d never met her before. (I know her dad from the cricket team he and I play for.) She was also an excellent tour guide. She drove me to Twin Peaks, which has an amazing view of downtown San Francisco:
We also went to the ocean, including the site of the abandoned Sutro baths, which look as though they could be ancient Roman ruins:
And conveniently enough, she was house-sitting for a friend, so I could crash in her room—a good thing, as her apartment’s couch was occupied by two guests of one of her roommates. That night I went to the Giants game; they were playing the Brewers and lost a closely-fought 2-1 game despite a solid performance from Tim Lincecum. It was a beautiful ball park, and San Francisco deserves some credit for being a great baseball town: the place was packed and the fans were loud.
After the game I walked along the waterfront all the way to the Fisherman’s Wharf area. It’s a lot of dumb touristy stuff, but they do have an In-N-Out Burger in the area. I scarfed down two double hamburgers and a chocolate milkshake.
The next day I set off on foot to explore as much of the city as I could. I walked to church at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption. It was built in the 1970s after a fire destroyed the previous cathedral building. It’s quite odd looking on the outside:
The inside is pretty strange too, but it’s also pretty stunning. The height of the interior is quite impressive, since the steeply-sloping sides accentuate and pull focus toward the top of the building. One unusual feature is large windows at the corners of the building, giving a view of the surrounding city. It seems like an unusual bit of architecture; churches are so often an attempt to create a sanctuary, a refuge from the surroundings; an attempt to draw focus to the rituals practiced therein. Presumably the large windows are a deliberate architectural choice meant to emphasize the outside world. I didn’t take any pictures of the interior, but you can find plenty of pictures (both inside and out) with Google Image Search.
The modern architecture clashed with the music—a small group of robed men singing Gregorian chants. You here bits and pieces of it everywhere, but I’d never seen quite so much of a Mass done in that style. After church there were donuts, and I make it a policy never to pass up free food. Then I walked back to Regina’s apartment. A little while later I headed out to a bar (the Black Magic Voodoo Lounge) that I had been told was headquarters for Saints fans in San Francisco; obviously, the Saints would be playing the next day, but I figured I might see a few fellow fans while I watched the tail end of the early morning games. On my way there, I was accosted by a homeless guy who started telling me his sob story. He said he was from New Orleans. (I was wearing a Saints shirt, so I was a little bit suspicious; surely, if I were homeless, I’d pretend to be from whatever city a tourist seemed to be from.) He said he used to work at Cafe du Monde. (Everybody knows about that.) And at Dillard University. (Okay, I’m starting to buy this a little.) He dropped a few other names. I asked what neighborhood he was from. “Hollygrove,” he said. He mentioned working at Sclafani’s. And he finished every sentence with “Ya heard me?” Obviously, he was legit, and because I’d stopped to hear the first sentence of his story I got roped into the whole spiel. He claimed to be diabetic and pleaded for some food. We ended up walking into a convenience store and I asked him what he wanted. He got some beef jerky, I bought myself some M&M’s, and I let him keep the change from a five-dollar bill. So if you’re homeless and you want my money, you need a good New Orleans sob story. After walking out of the convenience store, he begged for a ten or a twenty, but I rebuffed him and kept on walking.
When I got to the bar I saw walls covered with beads, a neon Saints sign, and bottles of Abita on the shelf behind the bar. It was all but empty when I got there, but as the afternoon wore on, groups of Saints fans started coming in. As far as I could tell it was a mix of both tourists and transplants from New Orleans. I was in a Saints shirt, and my presence there seemed completely unremarkable. The bartender said nothing about my shirt or Louisiana ID. The people I saw made no mention either. It was as if I were in a neighborhood bar in Uptown or Mid-City: New Orleans people having a few drinks and watching football. I didn’t stay too long; next I walked over to Lombard Street, the famous zig-zag. I didn’t walk all the way down the stairs alongside the street, but I did snap a few pictures:
In retrospect I wish I had gone all the way to the bottom, as the pictures I’ve seen from there look a lot more impressive than the pictures looking down the street. But San Francisco is hilly enough, and I didn’t feel like adding on to my punishing walk. I went down to the waterfront and started off for the Golden Gate bridge. It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and what struck me most was how good a time everyone seemed to be having. I passed by a park having a huge kite festival; kids flew tiny paper kites while some enthusiasts had giant ones with tails stretching 40 feet long. I kept on walking toward the Golden Gate Bridge. I had no intention of walking all the way across, but I did walk onto the bridge to view the cables up close and get a view of downtown. Then I planned on walking back toward a streetcar or bus line, but I ended up semi-lost in the Presidio, a massive park.
Eventually I found my way out (thank you, GPS) and hopped on a streetcar. That evening Regina wanted to meet a friend of her dad’s at a bar; she’d known the guy’s family for years, babysat one of his kids, etc. I went with her and we walked into a bar packed with Saints fans. I had a beer, but I’d eaten almost nothing all day, so I went to a Mexican restaurant next door and had some really good carnitas tacos.
The next day I did more walking, going to the Chinatown and Little Italy sections. Then I hopped a train to Candlestick for the game. I’d bought Saints tickets (one for me, one for Regina as a way of thanking her for letting me crash) online the day before, but there was no working printer where I was staying, so I e-mailed the tickets to Regina and she said she’d print them out at work. I got to the stadium about two hours before kickoff. Then I waited…and waited…and waited. Regina drove to the stadium because one of her coworkers wanted a ride. Huge mistake. It was a piece of cake to take a train from downtown SF and then hop a shuttle bus to the stadium. But driving was a nightmare. Even after the game started the streets were packed. By the time she got there and we walked in, it was the end of the first quarter. I was more pissed at myself than anything; I should have insisted that we go to an internet cafe or somewhere and print out the tickets the day before, so that I’d have mine and she’d have hers. But I was stupid.
My parents raved about what a great time they had last season when they went to the Saints-Dolphins game. I can’t say I enjoyed the Niners game as much as they did. The fans weren’t complete jerks, but they were pretty damn annoying for the most part. One guy was nice to enough to ask what I was doing in San Francisco, how long I was staying, if I was enjoying the city, and so forth, but most were semi-hostile. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I’d been with a bigger group of Saints fans. A few rows behind us there were maybe 15-20 Saints fans, but the only other ones nearby were a handful of groups of two or four people a few rows in front of us or a section over. I was struck by how much different the average fan was from the average fan at a Saints game. At the Superdome you see a lot of middle-aged married couples, maybe a father and his adult son, 50-year-old guys, that sort of thing. The crowd at the Niners game (in a comparable location to where my Saints seats are) was much younger. Lots of late twenties and early thirties drunk guys. Nowhere near as many women. And who’s more likely to give you crap and harass you: a 50-year-old man sitting next to his wife, or a drunk 25-year-old with a bunch of drunken buddies around him? It’s a pretty obvious answer. Also, I’d guess that Saints fans are nicer than usual to visiting fans because we’re more dependent on tourism than any other city in the league. We need people to want to come back.
As for the game itself: like just about every other Saints game this season, it was a nail-biter. The Niners fans were going nuts when Alex Smith looked like a Pro Bowler in leading his team on a late touchdown drive; they got even crazier when a booth review overturned a call on the field to give the Niners a tying two point conversion. But I knew that they had given Drew Brees way too much time. And sure enough, the Saints charged down the field, with the key play a sick back-shoulder throw to Marques Colston. The Saints pull that off all the time; you would think the Niners secondary had seen enough game film not to fall for it. The game ended with a fluky kick from Garrett Hartley. I saw a low line drive, an ugly kick, and I feared it would never go in; but then I saw it pass just over the crossbar, just inside the left upright. Sure enough, the officials raised their hands to signal the winning kick. I learned the next day that the ball had been deflected and yet had managed to go in anyway.
The next morning I had a horrendously early flight to catch. I took a BART train to the airport for a flight to Chicago by way of Long Beach.
Places Kevin Flies 